The Astor Theatre Bloghttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com
The official blog of Melbourne's Astor Theatre. Fine films and atmosphere since 1936!Wed, 13 Dec 2017 05:21:16 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngThe Astor Theatre Bloghttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com
Jim Jarmusch: Strange Touristhttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/jim-jarmusch-strange-tourist/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/jim-jarmusch-strange-tourist/#respondMon, 16 Jan 2017 03:04:53 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2346Continue reading Jim Jarmusch: Strange Tourist]]>The writer director Jim Jarmusch is in many ways a foreigner. He looks on his characters as if he just arrived in their world and is fascinated by their customs. There is no detail too small for him to obsess over. The camera lingers on every fashion choice, every book, every piece of cultural ephemera his characters come in to contact with. He’s not so much shallow as obsessed with surfaces. Dead pan looks are the most common form of communication. When his characters do speak, they speak flatly, as if reciting lines they’ve read out of a phrase book. Everyone in a Jarmusch film is a stranger in a strange land.

Despite being an American, Jarmusch is often categorized as a European style director. Maybe it’s because he’s not afraid to shoot in black and white. Maybe it’s because his scenes are often loaded with philosophical subtext. But mostly it’s because his films aren’t driven by the engine of plot, but by small character details, which he pieces together to create idiosyncratic tableaus that feel utterly foreign to mainstream American cinema.

“I work probably in an erratically backwards kind of way,” Jarmusch has said of his process. “I start with some actors… then I just start collecting things that inspire me, and they come all over the place, from music, from poetry, from literature, from architecture… from conversations I overhear”. It’s the sort of piecemeal, indirect strategy that should create an unfocused mess, but in Jarmusch’s hands results in moments that feel wonderfully alive.

Take, for example, the scene in Down By Law, where three convicts stamp around a prison cell screaming “I scream, you scream, we all scream for icecream!” or the one in Dead Man where William Blake (Johnny Depp) grieves a dying fawn while covering his face with its blood. These scenes are rarely ever one thing. They can be simultaneously funny, disturbing and strange. They are invitations to a mysterious country, one where Jarmusch has you playing the perpetual tourist.

]]>https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/jim-jarmusch-strange-tourist/feed/0RZ6A9302.JPGastorblogAstor Calendar Highlightshttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/astor-calendar-highlights/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/astor-calendar-highlights/#respondThu, 20 Oct 2016 07:20:07 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2293Continue reading Astor Calendar Highlights]]>The iconic Astor Calendar can be imposing. With over a hundred movies packed onto a single poster –including the cult, classic and flat out bizarre– a cinema-lover can be quickly overwhelmed. With this year-ending calendar featuring everything from cannibals to robot cowboys, we’re taking a look at a few of the films that beg to be seen on the legendary Astor screen.

CLASSIC DIRECTORS

At the Astor we love drawing attention to influential directors. Prior calendars have screened selections from Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and other spectacled dudes from the 70’s. This time round we have Astor regular Stanley Kubrick playing every Friday from the 18th of November to 9th of December, including one of our favorite 35mm prints–2001: A Space Odyssey.

From the 21st to the 23rd of December we’re celebrating visionary Indian Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray. This includes a screening of Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited, a film deeply indebted to Ray’s humanist themes that includes a selection of his beautiful scores. Akira Kurosawa once said that “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.” You’ve been warned.

DON’T MISS: Our Jaques Tati double. A successor of Chaplin and Keaton, Tati was not only a gifted physical performer but a visual stylist on par with the aforementioned Kubrick. We’ll be playing Mon Oncle and Playtime, the latter of which (in one blogger’s opinion) is a near-perfect movie, equal parts scathing satire and gentle humanity.

SPOTLIGHT ON GENRE

One of the great joys of the Astor calendar is seeing prestige films like The Last Tycoon rubbing elbows with genre gems like Battlestar Galactica. We have a great love for genre movies at the Astor, which a quick look down all the Monday sessions on any calendar will prove. Towards the end of December we’ll be screening a selection of classic film noirs that include The Third Man, Chinatown and The Petrified Forest.

Big Screen Experiences

The next few selections, in David Lynch’s words, you could “Never in a trillion years experience,” on the small screen. “If you have a chance to enter another world,” he told The New Review, “then you need a big picture in a dark room with great sound”. We know just the place.

For sheer spectacle, it’s hard to go past the king of monsters, Godzilla. Shin Godzilla (playing the Astor on the 16th of November) is the 29th Toho Godzilla movie (we shan’t speak of the American remakes) and the third reboot of the world’s favorite kaiju. Long story short, it’s a skyscraper-sized lizard wreaking havoc on Tokyo whose monstrosity deserves the full Astor treatment.

White Dog, on the other end of the ambiguously evil animal spectrum, is a film smaller in scale but not ambition. The controversial movie was buried when it was released in 1982, but a Criterion Collection release has brought this socially conscious melodrama back into the cultural conversation. Concerning a dog trained to attack black men and the African American man attempting to rehabilitate him, the film pulls no punches in its searing look at race-relations in America. With an Ennio Morricone score and a gut-punch of an ending, it’s the kind of lost gem that deserves to be seen the way director Sam Fuller originally intended.

DON’T MISS:The Neon Demon. Director Nicholas Winding-Refn has nothing left to prove as a visual stylist, with movies like Valhalla Rising, Drive and Only God Forgives under his belt. But this Jodorowsky-esque nightmare might be him most beautiful and disquieting film yet. Described by The Telegraph as a “glittering, etherized nightmare…with a dark, coiled panther energy”, the movie stars Elle Fanning as… well, we’re not going to bother with words when Refn’s images are available.

]]>https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/astor-calendar-highlights/feed/0astor-2astorblogDreaming Smallhttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/dreaming-small/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/dreaming-small/#respondFri, 14 Oct 2016 02:02:20 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2251Continue reading Dreaming Small]]>With major movie budgets ballooning, it’s important to remember that you don’t need the equivalent of Ethiopia’s GDP to make a movie. The rise of digital technology has launched a renaissance in low budget filmmaking. Some of these are amateur productions filled with jumpcuts and visible boom mics, but many are brimming with the character that can only be provided by the creative desperation of a cash-strapped auteur. Which of these films we’ll still be talking about in 2036 will depend not so much on budget but on spirit.The micro-budget classics of the late 80’s and early 90’s have blazed a path to the cultural canon, often for less than the cost of a secondhand car. Here are some of our favourites.

Bad Taste

Preceding the early 90’s American indie movement by a good few years, young New Zealander Peter Jackson made a series of low-budget sci-fi/horror films that had the giddy energy of a kid’s gory sketches come to life. 1986’s Bad Taste delivers exactly what the title promises with a ridiculously silly gorefest tied together by a nonsense plot. It’s glorious silliness is perhaps best evidenced by the fact that Jackson plays two separate characters in the film, a bold (and by all accounts necessary) bit of casting that led to a scene where he murders himself on a cliff face.

El Mariachi

On the other side of the globe and a few years later, a young Robert Rodriguez was volunteering as a human lab rat to bankroll his first feature. The resulting El Mariachi is a lean, lo-fi action film that somehow also feels like a blockbuster. Much like Jackson, Rodriguez didn’t let his low budget limit his vision, choosing to cut costs behind the camera rather than in front of it. He shot the whole feature length film as a one-man crew and would often cast random villagers in minor speaking roles. To cut down on the productions greatest cost, the film itself, he changed angles every time an actor made a mistake to keep all scenes down to a single take. All dialogue was recorded after shooting was complete on a tape recorder and dubbed in later. El Mariachi cost less than $7,000 and launched a directorial career that gave us Sin City, Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn. It was a bravura debut, chock full of action and bursting with character.

Clerks

A couple years later, Kevin Smith took Rodriguez’s economical production model and made Clerks, a black and white comedy set in a convenience store. But instead of simply copying Rodriguez’s use of action setpieces (as if such a thing were possible) Smith chose to doubledown on character. Shooting at the store where he worked, Smith’s movie crafts a series of crass conversations, character quirks and banal details into a highly effective comedy. Considering Smith would go on to make movies a movie about renegade angels and sentient Nazi sausages, Clerks is almost heroic in its smallness. With its low-key, realistic dialogue and precisely drawn characters, it’s now seen as a precursor to the modern mumblecore comedies of the Duplass brothers or Lena Dunham.

Though all of these directors went on to direct much bigger (and in many cases better) movies, it’s hard not to be a little nostalgic for the ramshackle charm of their micro-budget debuts. Halfway through the third dwarven shanty in The Hobbit, I know I would’ve appreciated a little less polish and a little more bad taste.

]]>https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/dreaming-small/feed/0clerksastorblogThe Thing: Monsters In The Lighthttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/24/the-thing-monsters-in-the-light/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/24/the-thing-monsters-in-the-light/#respondSat, 24 Sep 2016 05:48:46 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2247Continue reading The Thing: Monsters In The Light]]>There is a rare psychological condition known as Capgras delusion, where sufferers believe that friends and family have been replaced by doppelgängers. In the early 90’s, one woman was hospitalised due to:

…her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with the impostor, locked her bedroom and door at night, asked her son for a gun, and finally fought with the police when attempts were made to hospitalise her… She easily recognised other family members and would misidentify her husband only.

It would be terrifying to be that woman, to sense that someone close is an impostor and no one knows but you. The fear that behind the familiar façade of a friend’s face is something horrific is a fertile premise that has been exploited by everyone from Don Siegel to Edgar Wright because it gets at one of our most primitive fears: who can we trust?

John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of the finest examples of the trope. The story of an isolated research team in Antarctica getting picked off by a shapeshifting alien, The Thing has the jittery energy of an over caffeinated conspiracy theorist. In the 34 years since its premiere, it’s followed the familiar trajectory of box office failure to cult classic much like many of Carpenter’s films. Carpenter, for his money, suspects that cinema-goers at the time didn’t like “the horrible inevitability of the movie”, and he might well have a point. If most horror films are like haunted house rides, The Thing is like having your feet stuck in cement as you watch a car accelerate towards you.

Among many of the film’s admirers is Quentin Tarantino, who said the film was a direct influence on Astor favorite The Hateful Eight. “The paranoia amongst the characters was so strong, trapped in that enclosure for so long, that it just bounced off all the walls until it had nowhere to go but out into the audience. That is what I was trying to achieve.” Because for all the horrifying scenes of decapitated heads growing spider legs and dogs splitting in two, the true monster of The Thing is the paranoia that tears the team apart. The camp’s mechanic Childs (Keith David) gets at the existential terror directly when he asks, “How do we know who’s human? If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know it was really me?”

Many horror movies capitalise on our innate fear of the unknown by having creatures skittering around in the shadows. When you see the creature in The Thing, it’s under harsh, direct fluorescent light. Because Carpenter knows that this moment isn’t the frightening one, it’s the scenes following, where the shapeshifter could be anyone. All of a sudden we’re studying every familiar face, looking to see if they’ve changed behind their eyes.

The Astor Theatre will be playing The Thing in a double bill with Videodrome, Monday 26th September

]]>https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/24/the-thing-monsters-in-the-light/feed/0the-thingastorblogDancing About Architecturehttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/dancing-about-architecture/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/dancing-about-architecture/#respondThu, 22 Sep 2016 07:11:22 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2214Continue reading Dancing About Architecture]]>When it comes to the raw emotional power of great music, it seems Hollywood producers have taken the saying “talking about music is like dancing about architecture” as a challenge, rather than a warning. In two hours of narrative, their logic seems to go, we should be able to work out what makes a piece of music or a musician great. Sometimes this is like watching a dog chase its own tail, but it’s hard not to get excited when their jaws get close. Here are a few (but far from all) of the ways Hollywood explores music.

The Biopic

These films usually come at you initially with a backlit poster of the hot actor of the moment in the iconic pose of a legendary musician, often with a not-so-subtle nod to one their hits in the tagline (“before he walked the line…”). Then the trailer comes at you and you see the hot actor talking and singing with what is (hopefully) a pretty close approximation of the legend physically and sonically.

The movie itself, when it arrives, is often a cradle-to-grave narrative that attempts to “explain” the musician, or at least how the music came into existence. At its best, this results in films like Walk the Line or Ray, where a compelling lead performance shows the music’s origins in pain, longing and oppression. This format can get weird when that “legend” appears in the protagonist role of their own movie, like in 8 Mile or the disastrous Mariah Carey vehicle Glitter.

Though not technically a biopic, everything you need to know about the genre can be gleamed from the vastly underrated Walk Hard.

The Fictional Biopic

Unlike its factual counterpart, the fictional biopic is often more interested in a musical movement as a whole rather than a specific historical figure, using its protagonist instead as a surrogate into the culture. One of the finest examples in recent memory was the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a melancholy tour through 1960’s Greenwich Village and the tortured emotional merry-go-round of its protagonist. Populated with thinly-fictionalised Greenwich legends (any folk-nerd worth her salt would see the Irish men in woolly turtlenecks and know they’re supposed to be the Clancy brothers), it distills that strange moment in time into a beautiful film-length elegy. On the other end of the quality spectrum, but no less amazing, is Mark Wahlberg’s wonderfully misguided Rockstar, which seems to think it’s a look inside the 80’s hair metal industry but plays more like an extended version of Boogie Nights’ You Got the Touch scene.

The Fan Pic

Instead of trying to understand the music or the musicians, these films take a look at the people who really create legends, music nerds. High Fidelity, Empire Records and Almost Famous are all about a gang of misfits rallying around the musical obsession that holds them together. Expect scenes of characters lovingly touching record sleeves and learning that it’s not enough to connect with the music, they have to connect with other people as well.

The Astor Theatre will be playing Begin Again & Sing Street in a double bill Friday 23rd September.

Truck Turner is a movie of a very specific time and place. To give you an idea of how specific, it contains countless multiple uses of the phrase “jive ass sucker”, a pimp parade and a protagonist with the Christian name “Truck”. The eponymous Truck is played by Isaac Hayes and it’s doubly strange to hear the voice of South Park’s Chef say things like “I think we’re gonna have to waste that pimp,” with little to no irony. But to understand Truck, it’s necessary to understand the amalgam of influences that inform the blaxploitation genre.

Kicked off in 1971 by Mario Van Peebles Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, blaxploitation is the fusion of traditional B-picture narratives with the characteristics (both real and as imagined by white America) of what was then referred to as the “urban” market. This made them a strange marriage of social critique and exploitation cinema, creating a genre that was the first to predominantly cater to and star African Americans. Mostly low-budget affairs, blaxploitation films often pitted a lone African American against a violent organization, usually run by white men. The giddy energy of exploitation movies – which were heavy on sex, violence and light on production value – collided with the moral outrages of the time to form something entirely strange and unmistakably American.

As Truck Turner, Isaac Hayes swaggers through sets that look like they’ve been constructed out of balsa wood with the confidence of a man who wears sunglasses inside. A bounty hunter for a bail bondsman, Truck takes down petty criminals with a mixture of style and brutal violence. But when one of his shootouts goes south, he finds himself at war with the local pimping population.

Hayes lends an additional element vital to any decent blaxploitation flick: the soundtrack. With production values that often surpassed the films they were scoring, these soundtracks invented a sound so iconic they conjure up images of afros, muscle cars and bell-bottoms to this day. Fusing soul and funk, they had soaring strings movements, muscular brass sections and propulsive rhythms in impossible time signatures. These scores elevated the often cheesy stories into something engaging and entirely unique.

Like the western, the blaxploitation genre wasn’t as interested in telling grounded stories as inventing a mythic landscape, one that resembled the inner urban areas familiar to black America. At times this was done so ham-fistedly as to make them laughable or worse, downright offensive in their use of reductive stereotypes. But at their best they offered a searing, stylised view of a divided America, one not pictured in the more respected films of the time.

Painted on the side of Truck’s bail bondman office is an arrow pointing to the entrance with the words “Door of Freedom”. It’s a small, subtle touch in a movie brimming with brashness and bravado. But when you see Truck on a case and behind the wheel, racing through the Los Angeles streets, that sign rings true.

]]>https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/truck-turners-door-of-freedom/feed/0BLAXPLOITATION FILMSastorblogDavid Lynch: In Dreamshttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/david-lynch-in-dreams/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/david-lynch-in-dreams/#commentsFri, 02 Sep 2016 01:39:37 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2206Continue reading David Lynch: In Dreams]]>The writer George Saunders has said that art’s job is not to believably recreate reality or even impart a message but to craft a “kind of black box [that] the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another.” What the artist puts in that box could be anything, so long as it evokes something “undeniable and nontrivial” in the audience. In his book Catching the Big Fish David Lynch said that when he came up with Blue Velvet all he had “was red lips, green lawns and the song–Bobby Vinton’s version of Blue Velvet. The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.”

To give a detailed summary of Blue Velvet would be pointless – you could easily read the film’s entire plot on Wikipedia and know nothing important about it. But to sketch it out briefly: college boy Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns to his hometown and is drawn into a mystery. Simple.

More important is how Blue Velvet feels, how it oscillates violently between dream and nightmare. Two different universes seem to coexist inside the same town. The first is Norman Rockwell’s imagined 1950’s, a cheery, sexless place that revolves around milkshakes and chastened dates, even though it’s 1986. It’s populated by Jeffrey’s crush Sandy (Laura Dern), his ailing father and the good-natured police detective who tells him not to worry about the severed human ear he found. The second town is a hellscape of rape, murder and sadomasochism populated by people like lounge singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) and Frank (Dennis Hopper), a psychopathic gangster who could be Lynch’s most evil creation. The film’s not so much about the particulars of the plot as how Jeffrey finds himself caught between these worlds. A good American boy who spies through a closet door into a world of sex and violence and sees something he likes, even if he can’t understand why.

Blue Velvet is hypnotically beautiful, but it’s not an easy watch. Not only do horrible things happen, they are lingered on. The film doesn’t even give you the relief of judging or condemning these horrible acts. Instead it presents violent scenes with a cold remove, often following them up with scenes of sumptuous beauty. Roger Ebert, one of the few detractors of the film, said that “The sexual material in Blue Velvet is so disturbing, and the performance by Rossellini is so convincing and courageous, that it demands a movie that deserves it”. He claimed that the movie was beautifully crafted, but too clever for its own good. “Blue Velvet is like the guy who drives you nuts by hinting at horrifying news and then saying, “Never mind.”” But it would be a mistake to think Lynch himself was that removed. For him, it seems, the movie is extremely personal. “When I was little,” Lynch said, explaining the inspiration for Isabella Rossellini’s character, “my brother and I were outdoors late one night, and we saw a naked woman come walking down the street toward us in a dazed state, crying. I have never forgotten that moment.”

Early in the film, before such images of raw horror, it feels like Lynch is setting up archetypes rather than characters – the schoolgirl ingénue, the amateur gumshoe, the mysterious woman. But as the film progresses a rot sets in, eating away at some of the archetypes’ familiar exteriors, revealing something horrifying and unknowable. Lynch violates the unspoken agreement between director and audience by robbing us of any of the tools we might use to make moral or aesthetic sense of the film. The writer David Foster Wallace argued that this is what gives Lynch’s best films such primal power:

…in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We’re defenseless in our dreams too.)

Come join us this weekend to enter the black box Lynch has created. The dream might not be real, but when you emerge from the darkness you will feel changed.

]]>https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/david-lynch-in-dreams/feed/1Blue-VelvetastorblogThe Missing Pieces of Citizen Kanehttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/the-missing-pieces-of-citizen-kane/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/the-missing-pieces-of-citizen-kane/#respondSat, 27 Aug 2016 07:29:10 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2202Continue reading The Missing Pieces of Citizen Kane]]>Named #1 film of all time by just about every list of repute, Citizen Kane’s impact is almost impossible to overstate. And much like its protagonist, the film’s history is ripe with stories of intrigue and sabotage.

Ostensibly the life story of millionaire newspaper man Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), Citizen Kane is a series of vignettes, cutting across time as various characters describe the Kane they knew in the wake of his death. The conceit illuminates a fascinating but inconsistent figure, who was either a magnanimous genius or tortured brat depending on who’s telling the story. The central McGuffin of the film is “rosebud”, Kane’s final word before dying, believed by some to be the key to uncovering the true Kane.

Coming off the BBC broadcast of War of the Worlds that had real Americans fleeing from imaginary aliens, Citizen Kane was the wunderkind Welles’ first feature. It was not only eagerly anticipated but controversial from its inception as it was loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper publisher and titan of industry who was reportedly furious at Welles for the depiction.

Along with his cinematographer Greg Toland, Welles pioneered “deep focus” for the film, a technique that kept the foreground and background in focus simultaneously. Which is to say when it comes to Citizen Kane, every detail is important. By drawing equal attention to foreground action and ambiguous background detail, the film encourages a conspiratorial frame of mind. That might go part of the way to explaining why Gore Vidal penned a bizarre article claiming that “rosebud” was the name of Hearst’s mistress’ clitoris. Similar paranoiac views sprouted even around scenes that were planned but never filmed, including one involving adultery and murder that Welles claimed was cribbed directly from Hearst’s life. Which would in turn help explain why Hearst planted a naked woman and a photographerin Welles room to get a compromising snap. How much of any of this is true depends on who’s doing the telling.

Citizen Kane is designed as a fools errand. It takes the epic sprawl of a complicated life and tries to turn it into a cogent chronology. Kane is doubtful in life that “there’s one word that could describe a man’s life”. A reporter later in the film gives up on the search for rosebud, saying “I guess rosebud is just a… piece in a jigsaw puzzle… a missing piece”. Citizen Kane paints a fascinating picture of its protagonist that is never quite completed, an elusive masterwork that we’ll never be able to entirely put together. Which of course means that we’ll never be done with it.

]]>https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/the-missing-pieces-of-citizen-kane/feed/0Citizen-Kane-mirrorastorblogWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Alienshttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-aliens/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-aliens/#respondThu, 11 Aug 2016 09:34:26 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2193Continue reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Aliens]]>The best possible way for an apocalypse to kick off is probably with Orson Welles’ soothing baritone. In 1938, on the Columbia Broadcasting Company, Welles’ explained that humanity was being watched by “minds that to our minds are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic [that] regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us”. It was a prophecy of doom and destruction that was broadcast out to millions of Americans. It was also a work of fiction. The broadcast even opened with credits, namely that of Welles’ Mercury Theatre troupe and the story’s author H.G. Wells. But many listeners tuned in too late, hearing only what sounded like news reporters describe a creature from outer space whose “eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate”. Panic broke out as real citizens took to the street in an attempt to outrun the fictional aliens. One woman reportedly burst into an Indianapolis church and screamed, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!”

There is a rich history of aliens in fiction.This is likely because aside from the occasional abduction/probing story, we know nothing about them. They might not even exist. So they become a void we fill with our collective psychic baggage, whether that baggage be emotional, political or social. And when we think about aliens as film-goers, it’s telling that our brains often jump to an image of destruction.

It’s natural to project our global history onto aliens. We figure if they’re coming to our proverbial shores with massive transport ships and superior firepower, their intentions might not be to “come in peace”. A cinematic alien attack can be in the form of the massive spaceships ala Independence Day or the massive, Cthulhu-like beasts of Cloverfield and Pacific Rim that lay waste to iconic skylines. Occasionally movies will flip this dynamic, having the humans invade an alien planet like in Avatar, making the colonial metaphor even more explicit.

The more conspiratorially-minded viewer might prefer the idea that aliens already live secretly among us, like in Men In Black or They Live. The thought that your neighbour might secretly be from outer space evokes an almost Cold War paranoia, creating a tension between what you suspect and what you know that sustained the X-Files across 10 seasons and two movies. It also gets at that weird niggling feeling that we all have that it’s impossible to really know somebody, that for all the things you’ve been through, your best friend might be an alien travel-book writer with the improbable name of Ford Prefect.

Instead of filling the void, some films choose to stare into it. The aliens of 2001: A Space Odyssey are never seen directly. They do not make clear their intentions, or really bother to speak to humanity directly. They become a surrogate God, powerful and unknowable. Likewise the alien of John Carpenter’s The Thing is never really seen, in fact it can’t really be said to have a true form. It is a shapeshifter that hides in plain sight, seemingly only driven by survival as it dismembers human bodies and poisons any sense of collective trust.

The same year CBS broadcasted War of the Worlds Detective Comics bought the rights to another alien story, Superman. In the first few pages of Action Comics #1, an alien baby was sent to Earth, raised in an orphanage, revealed his incredible strength and matured into a superhuman man who decides to “turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind”. From space orphan to Christ-figure in 12 swift pages, Superman has become an icon for hopefulness in dark times. With all his power he could have taken the violent conqueror route. Instead he was written as a “light to show the way”. He was a correction to society’s darker habits, a beacon of light to turn to.

Wells’ tentacled monsters were sent to us as a kind of fictional atonement for our violent history, but Superman was sent to us because of our “capacity for good”. If films are like dreams, it says a lot whether we have paranoid nightmares or utopian visions.

Independence Day and Independence Day: Resurgence will be playing this Thursday in 2K.

]]>https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-aliens/feed/0SupermanastorblogID.jpgDie Hard: Walking On Broken Glasshttps://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/die-hard-walking-on-broken-glass/
https://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/die-hard-walking-on-broken-glass/#respondMon, 01 Aug 2016 04:54:21 +0000http://astortheatreblog.wordpress.com/?p=2187Continue reading Die Hard: Walking On Broken Glass]]>The action movie hero is a strange beast. These brawny archetypes affect an everyman attitude in the first act, yet by the third have proven to be indestructible superhumans. As quick with a joke as they are to take off their shirt and reveal their He-Man-esque physiques, these heroes know just what to do when faced with a violent threat. In the 80’s, the action hero was probably best defined by the marble-mouthed duo of Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Stallone started the decade with First Blood, a movie about a veteran suffering from PTSD. By 88 that same character was blowing up Soviet helicopters with a bow and arrow and Rocky Balboa was crushing the communist threat. Schwarzenegger characters rarely ever feign human frailty, whether they are literal killing machines (in TheTerminator series) or beefcakes who combine insult comedy with their murder.

One of the greatest action movie heroes is, without a doubt, Die Hard’s John McClane (Bruce Willis). He has all the bonafides: looks good in a singlet and is as comfortable with one-liners as a machine gun. However unlike many other action heroes that year, he appears to be made of the same ingredients as ordinary humans. Case in point, when he’s evading gun fire and steps on broken glass, it cuts his feet up and hurts like hell. In a film filled with spectacular setpieces, the scene where McClane removes shards of glass from his feet might have the most impact.

The grotesque and very real damage inflicted on McClane establishes the movie’s stakes – this guy COULD be killed yet is putting everything on the line to save the day. Like his advocate on the outside (Reginald VelJohnson) says, “This man is hurting! He’s alone, tired and hasn’t seen diddly-squat from anybody down here”. John McClane is deadly, but he’s also mortal. The movie’s villain Hans Gruber (the late great Alan Rickman, in his first film role) accuses McClane of being being “Just another American who saw too many movies as a child. Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s … Rambo”. The implication is that McClane, for all his ingenuity, is not Rambo. He’s not a fictional one man army, he’s an exhausted cop with cut up feet. Gruber accuses him of playing cowboy, an accusation McClane seems to somewhat agree with. “I was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers, personally. I really like those sequined shirts.”

It’s hard to imagine an Arnie character having the same level of meta-awareness. Or Fast and the Furious’ Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), the man who lives half a mile at a time. Interestingly, the same gradual separation from reality that lessened the impact of subsequent Die Hard sequels might have been the thing that reinvigorated the Fast & the Furious franchise. While John McClane’s I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening-to-me-again earnestness has worn thin since he’s riddled thousands of would-be assailants with bullets, the TFATF world has evolved into a cartoon wonderland where anything is possible.

But as wonderful as they are, movies like TFATF or the ludicrous Crank are like playing a video game with cheat codes on. It can be a lot of fun running around Vice City with unlimited health and rocket launcher shells, but it lacks dramatic stakes. Die Hard is closer to paintball; the bullets might not be real, but they do leave a bruise.

Yippie-ki-yay.

Die Hard will be playing this Thursday in a double bill with Predator.